Filmmakers don't work for posterity. We create with celluloid and chemical pigments that don't last very long. They fade away. In 200 years there will be nothing left of our work but dust.
I didn't feel like going any further in this scene with the boy. He was not a professional actor, and if I had pushed the scene any further it would have destroyed the tone of the movie.
It was not about my mother, of course. It was about a kind of idealized fantasy mother. Young boys hypothesize when young.
Just because the movie is about incest does not make it autobiographical. Yes, I have a mother, but that does not make me unique.
My brother and I have been playing a little parlor game. We ask ourselves how other directors would have ended this movie. What Fellini would have done. Bergman. Antonioni.
Suddenly this idea came to me for a film about incest. It was almost a daydream. I wrote out 60 or 70 pages in a few days. I showed them to friends, got a warm reaction, decided to make the film.
The Oedipus complex is like a joke. It takes years to discover that there is a dream ideal, an initiating mother, in our subconscious.
The problem was to somehow de-dramatize the highly-charged emotional materials we were working on. They were so loaded they could have destroyed the whole balance of the movie.
Well, Fellini... there is always Fellini.
When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.
You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.
How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right.
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